


mother-of-pearl

by alethiometry



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 19:09:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17209268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alethiometry/pseuds/alethiometry
Summary: It should have been a simple job, something to fill the time while the crew are on much-deserved shore leave in Seriphos; something they could accomplish in half a day, just to keep him and his little sister busy. Find some gems and pearls, make some jewelry. Make a little girl happy.But when was the last time anything worth doing was ever simple?





	mother-of-pearl

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授权翻译！】mother-of-pearl](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20338294) by [dolly7151](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dolly7151/pseuds/dolly7151)



> This started off as a fix-it of sorts, because if there's one thing I'm salty about in Odyssey, it's the fact that sharks do not work in the way that Odyssey thinks they work, and every time I have to kill a shark to complete a quest, a little part of me dies inside. No sharks were harmed in the writing of this fic, and no sharks are harmed in the events of this fic.
> 
> (Also because I fucked up the "Making Friends" sidequest when I played it; this is my way of assuaging that guilt, too, I guess.)
> 
> Huge huge huge thank-you to Ellie ([ellrond](http://ellrond.tumblr.com/)) for looking this over! <3

His sister laughs in his face when he comes to her with his proposition.

Alexios frowns. “What’s so funny? You said you were bored.”

“I did,” she replies, “and I am. But you? Teaching me how to be a mercenary? Come on, Alexios, that’s fucking funny. ‘Teacher’ isn’t exactly the first thing people think of when they look at you.”

“I’ve taught lots of people lots of things,” Alexios protests. “I taught Phoibe how to read and write. I taught _you_ how to eat your damn food without puking it back up. I taught a dashing young healer in the Chora of Delphi the proper use for a well-oiled _olisb_ —”

“You are my brother, Alexios,” Kassandra interrupts, “and I would lay down my life for you in a heartbeat. But if you force me to listen to you finish that sentence, I will murder you myself, and write home to our dear _mater_ about the tragedy that befell her only son on his latest boar hunt.”

He wants to laugh, but he doesn’t doubt for a moment that she would, somehow, try to make good on her threat. At least a little bit, just to show him that she can. Remind him, and maybe herself, what an unstoppable force she can be, when she wants to be.

“Alright then,” he tells her amiably, rising from the bench where they’ve been sitting, people-watching, in the Seriphos marketplace. “Go back to the tavern and challenge Odessa to another drinking contest. And when you come to me with a bruised ego and yet another head-splitting hangover tomorrow morning, just remember that I gave you a choice.”

He walks away, and counts ten whole paces—no, eleven—before he hears a muttered “fuck you, Alexios” directly behind him. He grins, slowing his pace to walk side by side with his sister.

“I usually visit the _agora_ first,” he tells her. “Everyone comes through at some point in the day, so it’s a good place to start looking for jobs. Just make some idle chatter, let them know that we’re here to help. But I already asked around this morning; there was not much to do then, and it looks like there is not much to do now.”

“Fascinating.” Kassandra crosses her arms and rolls her eyes. “You truly are a master at your art, big brother. Shall I prostrate myself before you?”

Ignoring her, Alexios chooses a side road that leads away from the _agora_ . He’d better find a fucking job, he thinks, and fast. His sister’s patience does not run long on the best of days, and these past few days on Seriphos, where the _Adrestia_ crew have come to enjoy a much-deserved and long overdue shore leave, have been taxing on her. And when things are taxing on her, _she_ is taxing on _him_.

They are similar, in that regard; neither of them does well at rest. Luckily, there is always something for a _misthios_ to do.

Well, almost always.

He leads them to a field of clay-pits, where the foreman waves off their offers of assistance with a dismissive hand, citing bureaucratic codes and regulations as he does so, _so sorry, nothing to be done, you know how the landowners are with independent contractors—_

There are no special regulations, Alexios knows. It’s fucking clay. He just doesn’t want to pay them what they’re worth.

He ushers his sister away before she can think to find some way to impress upon the foreman the necessity of their services.

“Wait! _Misthioi!_ ” cries out a small voice, and they turn to see a little girl, caked head to toe in clay, sprinting down the road towards them.

Alexios grins, sinking to one knee, the better to look her in the eye. “Anything we can help you with, little lady?”

The little girl beams. Her name is Khloe, she tells them, and she needs help finding materials to fashion into “goo-welry”—

(“It’s pronounced _jewelry_ ,” Kassandra corrects her, still standing up straight, staring down her nose at them both. Alexios smacks her in the calf.)

—for the new friends she’s made since her mother’s recent death. No, she doesn’t have anyone else to take care of her; can they please fetch some pretty gemstones and pearls and meet her at her mother’s old hut, up on the hill? The stones are in the abandoned mine nearby, which is deep and dark and very scary; the pearls are in a shallow lagoon to the east, but there’s a shark in there so she can’t go get them, even though her _mater_ always said she was a strong swimmer.

“Not to worry, Khloe,” Alexios chuckles, giving her hair a little ruffle. “Run along, now; we’ll have your goo-welry supplies by sundown.”

“It’s _jewelry_ ,” Kassandra repeats. “Not _goo-welry_.”

Khloe pays her no attention as she scampers away.

“You could stand to be a little less abrasive, you know,” Alexios tells her while they walk. “She doesn’t look a day older than seven.”

“Someone has to teach her,” Kassandra says with a shrug, “and it won’t be her dead mother. _We’re here to help,_ remember?”

“Don’t quote me to me,” Alexios grumbles.

“Then stop contradicting yourself. Go get the stones from the mine,” Kassandra says. “I’ll head to the lagoon, and meet you at her house when I’m finished.”

Alexios sighs as Kassandra takes the right fork in the path without a backwards glance. He can tell she’s happy to have something to do once again, a problem she can fix, however trivial it may be. But, as always, that happiness comes muted beneath layers of habitual derision, as if she’s forgotten that she’s entitled to it at all. Cannot look at it straight on, or reveal to others that it’s there, lest it be taken from her in punishment. Like a treat she’s stolen from an open bowl while nobody was looking, despite the many, many times he’s patiently reminded her that it’s free for her taking.

At least she’s trying, he supposes. If he’d somehow survived even half the nightmare that she’s survived, he’s not sure he would be able to haul himself out of those depths with the same grit and sheer force of will that she seems to possess in boundless quantities.

So maybe he should have taken the lagoon instead, and she the mine. Because the mine is completely infested with snakes, and if there is one thing Alexios of Sparta, Eagle-Bearing _Misthios_ and defending Champion of the Arena fucking hates, it’s—

Well, it’s the Cult of fucking Kosmos. But snakes are a close second.

Still, he fetches the damn gemstones, and has to admit that they are very pretty indeed. He doesn’t really have an eye for the stuff, but they sparkle when they catch the sun, and he figures Khloe will know what to do with them. Far be it from him to teach a little girl how to make her goo-welry.

Kassandra is already sitting in front of Khloe’s house when he arrives, shucking oysters with a dagger and slurping up the meat inside with a disturbing level of satisfaction. She offers him one as he takes a seat next to her, which he vehemently declines.

“It’s good for you,” she says. “Makes your bones strong.”

“You’re disgusting, and there’s no way that’s true,” he tells her, wrinkling his nose. “Did you get the shark?”

“No. But I got the pearls,” Kassandra replies, showing him the three perfect, iridescent spheres in her free hand. “You don’t have to kill every predatory beast you encounter, Alexios. You know that, right?”

Alexios raises an eyebrow.

Kassandra rolls her eyes. “Sharks don’t attack unless you provoke them first.” She says it as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“They always seem to attack me,” he mutters.

Kassandra snorts, tossing the empty oyster shells aside. “That’s because you’re always covered in blood.”

He doesn’t really have a rebuttal for that, but it doesn’t matter because Khloe rounds the bend just then, still covered in clay, swinging her arms as she skips up to greet them. Her eyes light up when they present her with the pearls and gems and she immediately pulls out a ball of twine and begins stringing them up into little bracelets.

As she continues to chatter about her friends, Alexios notices that Kassandra’s eyes are narrowed in suspicion. Something about this is… off.

“Khloe,” he presses, “don’t you want to go into town to meet your friends? The sun’s going down soon; they may not be able to play outside much longer. Kassandra and I can walk you there and back so it isn’t scary.”

“Town?” Khloe frowns, confused, and presses a bracelet into the side of one of the still-wet clay mounds beside her mother’s house. “Why would we go all the way down there to play?”

Alexios looks at Khloe, then at the little mounds of clay heaped in a little arc around the yard. At the goo-welry, sparkling in the late afternoon sun, dangling from Khloe’s hands.

So much clay on Seriphos, he’d thought these mounds were just… more of the same.

But as he looks at them, each no higher or wider than Khloe herself, marginally more globular in the top region, the same markings pressed into each of them in all the same places, he sees them for what they are. For what Khloe thinks they are—or, at least, so desperately wants them to be.

When he looks at Kassandra, he sees that she’s had the same sinking revelation.

“When you said that you _made new friends_ ,” Alexios says slowly. “You meant—”

He gestures towards the lumps of clay. Khloe nods, beaming proudly.

“Do you think they like the goo-welry?” she asks. Eager. Happy. Hopeful.

Kassandra stares, dispassionate as ever. “Khloe,” she says with a sigh, “they’re not r—”

“Walk with me, Kassandra,” Alexios interjects at once, grabbing his sister by the arm and pulling her to her feet. He makes a hasty apology to Khloe, a promise that they’ll be right back, _just a moment, sorry, sorry, sorry,_ ignoring his sister’s scathing scowl, and marches her around a jutting boulder behind the house.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he hisses.

His sister wrenches herself out his grip. “I’m telling her the truth. Those aren’t friends; they’re just clay! You can’t possibly think it’s a good idea to play along with her delusion.”

_Gods,_ Alexios thinks, running a hand down his face. _Nothing is ever simple anymore._

What would he have told Phoibe, he wonders, if she’d been in this situation?

He would have told her the truth, he realizes with a sinking heart. He would have sat there, hating himself, as he watched her face crumple in despair. Would have justified the cruelty by convincing himself that sooner or later someone else would have come along and done the same; better she hear it from someone who loves her, than some random asshole somewhere down the line.

But that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? He’d always spoken to Phoibe in blunt terms, as if she were his age and not the little girl she actually was. She’d been robbed of her innocence long before Kephallonia, he knows, but in all the years they’d lived there, he’d never so much as lifted a finger to fix that.

Fat lot of good he’d done her, in the end.

“Look at her, Kassandra,” he pleads in hushed tones, gesturing to where Khloe prattles about, laughing and nodding as she converses with her clay friends. “She is completely alone! Anyone who ever cared for her is gone; why take away the one thing left that’s bringing her joy? It’s only going to break her heart even more than it’s already been broken.”

“Is that what you think she is? Heartbroken?” Kassandra’s lip curls and she glares at him, sharp and stern. “You fucking idiot. That’s not what heartbreak looks like.”

“Wh—”

But she turns away before he can ask her what the fuck she’s talking about, fixing her gaze on the dark, distant clouds on the horizon. Something shifts in her eyes, and suddenly he can tell that what she’s seeing is something else entirely.

“Do you feel the wind picking up?” she asks, and her voice is soft and steady and weighted with sorrow. “Do you see the storm out there, brewing over the ocean? It’ll hit this island by sunrise tomorrow, and the rain will wash away those clay figures, and that will be the first crack in that little girl’s heart. The second crack will come when the sky clears and she hauls up more clay from the clay-pits below to make her friends all over again, in the likeness of the ones she’s lost. And there will be more rain, and more clay, and more cracks, over and over and over, until one day she opens her eyes and finally sees this lie for what it is. And _that_ , brother, is when her sad, lonely little heart will truly and completely shatter.”

There is nothing he can say to that.

Kassandra stalks past him and heads for the path that leads down the hill and into town.

“Don’t lie to children, Alexios,” she says, still in that soft voice that makes his heart ache and ache. “It always ends poorly. _Always._ I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

He returns to Khloe’s house, alone, where she’s still making animated chatter with her lumpy, lifeless companions. She looks so happy, Alexios thinks. He hardly remembers a time when he was this carefree. But in his heart of hearts, he knows his sister is right.

“Khloe, would you come here a moment?” he says, kneeling in the dirt in the rapidly-fading light. She scampers over to him, offering him her last piece of goo-welry. He takes it, running his thumb over the ridges of the gems, the smoothness of the pearls.

“When your mother told you to go make friends,” he says, “this was not what she meant.”

Khloe stares at him, uncomprehending.

He sighs.

As long as it takes, he thinks. He’ll stay here and explain things to her as best he can, for as long as it takes her to understand. And he’ll hold her as she cries, sobbing out her pain in sharp and helpless little bleats, and he’ll weather the punches she throws at him, the kicks, stroking her hair and rubbing little circles in her back until she calms, until the breaths she draws steady their halting, plaintive shudders, until she wipes her eyes and goes up to each forlorn little clay figure and plucks the goo-welry from their wrists, one by one by one.

“Keep them,” he tells her when she offers them to him. “You can gift them to the other children in town.”

Khloe nods, swiping at her eyes, still puffy and rimmed with red. And then she yawns, long and deep and leans heavily against Alexios.

“Perhaps you should go to sleep,” he says, smiling a little, steadying her. “You’ve had a very eventful day.”

She nods again, followed by another yawn, and lets him carry her into the house and tuck her into the little mattress there. He wraps her snugly in the furs he finds folded in a corner, and she reaches for his hand before he can rise from where he sits beside her.

“Alexios?” Khloe says. “Where did your sister go?”

“I think she went back into town,” he replies. “She’s a bit tired.”

“Oh.” Khloe frowns, disappointed. “She’s so pretty. I think she’d be even prettier if she smiled.”

“She probably would,” Alexios agrees. “She’s had a hard life, Khloe. And she’s… to be honest, she’s still pretty bad at making friends. But she’s trying her hardest.”

“Does she like goo-welry?”

“I… actually have no idea.” He can’t imagine his sister wearing anything but armor, but there’s no need to tell Khloe that. “I’ll ask her. Also, it’s pronounced _jewelry_. Je-wel-ry.”

“Oh. Okay. _Je-wel-ry_.” She wrinkles her nose. “That sounds funny.”

Alexios laughs. “I’ll take one bracelet,” he says, “for her to try on. The rest are for the friends you’ll make tomorrow.”

Khloe nods sleepily, squeezing his hand.

“Do you want me to stay the night?” he asks, running a thumb over the backs of her knuckles, the way he’d done for Phoibe, that one time she fell ill after they’d eaten a bad fish. The way he faintly recalls his mother doing for him, once upon a time, when he was Khloe’s age.

Another nod.

He stays.

Presently she drifts off to sleep, curled into a warm little ball, her breathing evening out. He lets his hand rest a moment on her head, then turns and gathers up another set of furs for himself—and comes face-to-face with his sister watching him from just outside the doorway.

She flinches when his eyes meet hers, as if he’s caught her doing something she shouldn’t have been doing. Like sneaking a treat from an open bowl… or stealing a glimpse of something he has to keep reminding himself she never had. Was never allowed to want. Her hands, hanging at her sides, clench themselves into fists, then unclench again, and she looks away, sinking down to the ground outside with her knees hugged to her chest.

He sits down next to her, offering her the bracelet.

“For you,” he tells her, smiling. “From Khloe.”

Kassandra takes it gingerly, squinting closely, as if she’s never seen anything like it before. “What do I do with it?”

Alexios shrugs. “Wear it, I suppose?” he says. “On your wrist. Or... in your hair? I don’t know. Whatever you want. She wants you to have it.”

She sniffs, nonplussed, then reaches down and ties it in a loop around the buckle of her sword belt.

“It doesn’t seem safe there.” She frowns, looking down. “I’ll keep it in your armor chest when we re-board the _Adrestia_.”

“You were right, you know,” Alexios tells her. “In making me tell Khloe the truth. She cried and cried and cried, but she will wake in the morning with truth in her heart.”

Kassandra nods. Then, slowly, hesitantly, she rests her head on his shoulder. He wraps an arm around her to bring her closer, and draws the furs around them both.

“You helped somebody today, Kassandra,” Alexios says. “Khloe is better off now than when she woke up this morning. Because of you.”

“It still won’t be easy for her,” Kassandra murmurs. “Even if she makes friends with all the other children on this island, even if somebody takes pity on her and takes her in to raise as their own. Her mother is still dead. Still left her all alone up here to fend for herself. And that part of her will always be broken.”

“It will get easier,” he assures her.

“Some things don’t.”

Sometimes he doesn’t know how to convince her that not everything breaks permanently.

“I broke your heart, didn’t I?” he says. “Little by little, like you described. Every time we met, every time we talked. More and more cracks, until finally it shattered you, that day on Mount Taygetos.”

“No,” Kassandra whispers, “Alexios, you didn’t. I tried to convince myself that that was what you were doing, but the truth is _they_ broke it long ago. Years and years before you found me again, in that cave below Delphi.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. The only thing you shattered was the cage they put around those pieces to keep them disparate. To keep me broken. I wore it for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like to live without it, but now I am learning again. You’re showing me how.”

Alexios can’t help but grin. “I did tell you,” he says. “I’m a great teacher.”

Kassandra snorts, elbowing him lightly in the ribs. “Or maybe I’m just a great student. You’re fucking lucky to have me.”

“Yes.” Alexios smiles, and gives her shoulder a little squeeze. “Maybe I am.”


End file.
